Tech

App Developer Makes Craigslist Mobile, the Legal Way

Your phone is the tool you use to snap a photo, browse the web and email or call potential buyers, so why must Craigslist stubbornly hide on your desktop? Anyone who's sold several household items when moving knows this frustration well. We've come to expect more from the Internet tools we use.

Luckily, the three basic features that separate Craigslist from top-of-market apps — save to favorites, create (push) alerts for searches, and post a listing and upload photos directly from mobile — come to your iPhone and Android today, and from a maker that's constructed its business around creating elegantly designed mobile experiences on top of existing applications.

Mokriya Craigslist is built by development company Mokriya, which previously has done design and development work on iOS, Android and Blackberry, for startups well-regarded for innovative design, including Path, Threadflip and SimpleGeo.

The team put this experience to good use to bring Craigslist to mobile. Unlike other startups attempting to innovate on Craigslist's offering, Mokriya obtained a license from Craigslist a year ago, before beginning development. Bloomberg reports such a license could cost $5,000 per year and give Craigslist 10% of an app’s revenue.

The good news for users is that the app is free and mimics Craigslists' search conventions and categories in every way — while still debuting a intuitive design that makes sense on a small smartphone screen. The app also offers a map view (in addition to list and thumbnail views), calling or emailing a seller with one tap (goodbye, copy/paste) and ability to jump between categories and regions.

The three premium features introduced by Mokriya, which do not exist on Craigslist, will cost $1 — a one-time fee, inside the app.

Both the negligible pricing and compatibility with Craigslist's web presence are purposeful.

"We want to make sure everyone using Craigslist can go to us," says Mokriya CEO and co-founder Sunil Kanderi. Based on Craigslists' scale (the site is used by 60 million people each month), his pricing model could very well cover the operating costs of the app and make it worth the development team's efforts.

He admits that mixing Craigslist listings with other data can make for more interesting applications, but that was outside of the "fairly strict" licensing agreement, which prevents Mokriya from manipulating data or adding branding.

What's next for Mokriya probably isn't more classifieds listings — the team will stick to its roots of building mobile-first interfaces in tandem with applications that already exist. Kanderi mentioned they've taken a look at online dating, but don't have something to show us quite yet.

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